The second volume in Rosa Luxemburg’s Complete Works, entitled Economic Writings 2, contains a new English translation of Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Theory of Imperialism, one of the most important works ever composed on capitalism’s incessant drive for self-expansion and the integral connection between capitalism and imperialism. This new translation is the first to present the full work as composed by the author. It also contains her book-length response to her critics, The Accumulation of Capital, Or, What the Epigones Have Made Out of Marx’s Theory—An Anti-Critique. Taken together, these two works represent one of the most important Marxist studies of the globalization of capital.

Also included is an essay on the second and third volumes of Marx’s Capital, which had originally appeared as an unattributed chapter in Franz Mehring’s book Karl Marx.

Thank you to David Gaharia for helping to support the translation of this book.

Reviews

“One cannot read the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, even at this distance, without an acute yet mournful awareness of what Perry Anderson once termed ‘the history of possibility.’”

– Christopher Hitchens

“Luxemburg’s criticism of Marxism as dogma and her
stress on consciousness exerted an influence on the
women’s liberation movement which emerged in the
late ’60s and early ’70s.”

– Sheila Rowbotham, Guardian

“Rosa goes on being our source of fresh water in thirsty times.”

– Eduardo Galeano

“One of the most emotionally intelligent socialists in modern
history, a radical of luminous dimension whose intellect is
informed by sensibility, and whose largeness of spirit places her
in the company of the truly impressive.”

Celebrating #WomenInTranslation month this August, our last post in this series highlights foreign editions of Kate Evans' illustrated biography of Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-born German Jewish revolutionary whose life, work and writings in German, Polish and Russian have inspired generations in the nearly 100 years since her untimely death.

Befitting the status of an icon for worldwide socialist revolution, Kate Evan's beautifully drawn Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg has been translated since its 2015 publication into Korean, Turkish, Slovenian, Spanish and French.